But they were not a handsome race, and their
models for saints and virgins seem to have been the people that came
handiest and by no means the best looking. Thus the figures in their
pictures lack personal charm, though the painting is usually full of
vigour, truth, and skill.
When Flemings began to make tours in Italy and saw the pictures of
Raphael, in whom grace was native, they fell in love with his work
and returned to Flanders to try and paint as he did. But to them grace
was not God-given, and in their attempt to achieve it, their pictures
became sentimental and postured, and the naive simplicity and everyday
truth, so attractive in the works of the earlier school, perished.
The influence of the Van Eycks had not been confined to Flanders.
Artists in Germany had been profoundly affected. They learnt the new
technique of painting from the pupils of the Van Eycks in the fifteenth
century. Like them, too, they discarded gold backgrounds and tried
to paint men and women as they really looked, instead of in the old
conventional fashion of the Middle Ages. Schools of painting grew up
in several of the more important German towns, till towards the end
of the fifteenth century two German artists were born, Albert Durer
at Nuremberg in 1471, and Hans Holbein the younger at Augsburg in 1497,
who deserve to rank with the greatest painters of the time in any
country.
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